Extra Extra, Read All About It: Recovering Addict & Ex-ProDomme Outs Herself!

Ha—I knew that’d get your attention! You are so predictable! I love it.

Note: If you’re skittish about spoilers or too many words on a blog post, get the fuck out of here and just go listen to the interview I co-hosted with Unspeakable Axe for his Masocast podcast.

So, a few months ago this book Whip Smart (by Melissa Febos) was making a big splash (or stink, depending on who you talked to) in the BDSM community. Febos is an ex-ProDomme, who you may or may not know, who wrote a memoir about her career working in a commercial dungeon, the majority of it junked up on heroin. As a writer and ProDomme myself (who is staunchly against drug or alcohol use in session, or any type of non SSC play for that matter), I was torn whether to read it. Quite honestly, I’ve been majorly disappointed in pretty much every book I’ve read written by a former sex worker (call me a snob if you like, but I have high standards), but after all the hullaballoo I just couldn’t resist. So I borrowed a copy from Mistress Veronica (okay, the truth comes out—I didn’t want to spend money on it), and read it.

But like I said, before I read it, I had preconceptions based on what the community was saying. I knew it was controversial. I knew she was a junkie, and was high while working as a ProDomme. I knew she described people in the community in terms that may have revealed them, at least within the community. (Yup! It’s true, and she cops to it in the interview.)

But I also knew she was a good writer from having worked with her in journalistic circles a couple of years ago, at a time when neither of us knew the others’ secret. Or at least I didn’t know hers, she may have known about me, because I’ve been out about it to the majority for a while now. In any case, we never discussed it, because it wasn’t relevant to what we were working on then.

So I knew her, and was happy for her, happy that a fellow writer had published a book, and happy that it was related to one of my favorite topics: BDSM. So I wanted to like it, because I wanted to continue to like her and be happy for her. I didn’t get to know her at all when we worked together, we only spoke on the phone and emailed, never met in person. But I wanted to like her, I wanted to be proud of her. I am by nature a cynical optimist, so like I said above, I began reading expecting to be disappointed, but with an open mind.

Now, there are those in the community who feel that this book is not worth reading, that it’s slanderous and egregiously offensive, and when I hear these types of things, I wonder about the motivation for such harsh denunciations. It made me want to read it and form my own opinion even more so. I’m not a pushover or a patsy, and I’ve seen a lot of fucked up shit in my life, but I still enjoy allowing the best of people to surface. Which seems obvious enough to me—why would I want to be surrounded by people’s worst qualities rather than their best? Everyone has both exemplary and fucked up aspects to them, and I much prefer that people around me make an effort to be their best. So I look for their best, and accept that there’s likely some fucked up shit to go along with it.

Unfortunately I couldn’t like her once I started reading the book. I was offended several times, by her unfounded judgments, broad generalizations, shortsighted and narrow views. But I didn’t give up. I had decided that I was going to interview her, because I wanted to give her a chance to speak directly to the community, and I wanted the community to see her as a complicated person who is more than what can be contained in the pages of a book. This I know is fact from being a writer, and being a reader of writers I know. So even though I didn’t like her, I forced myself to continue reading, to keep my mind open to the larger story, to finish it and make up my own mind.

So I finished—what a relief! I found what I had come looking for: her epiphany. Even though it was in the form of just a few scant paragraphs* at the very end, it still reinforced what I knew intuitively: that her story was not about drugs, or about BDSM, but about transcendence and coming to terms with humanity. (Which, ironically, is what I feel the basis of BDSM is, but that’s a conversation for another time.) And she was sorry for having been offensive. She knew she had been judgmental, and she had regrets. These paragraphs wouldn’t have been powerful at the beginning of the book. I had to slog through (albeit well-written) ugliness to get to the epiphany. And it was worth it, just as the process of thorough and critical reading always has been for me.

My intuition tells me a couple things about the voices responsible for my negative preconceptions (only one person in the community told me she liked it): (A) They didn’t finish it, didn’t have the tenacity or willpower to get past their anger, and so didn’t make it to the paragraphs that made the whole thing work for me; or (B) they approached the read with negativity, didn’t want to like her, didn’t want to like the book, and were completely unreceptive and unable to recognize the epiphany when it came along.

Bottom line: Her story is valid. It’s not what I would have written by any stretch, but that’s because it’s not my story. It’s honest, and it’s her experience and her perspective. And though I can’t identify with much of it, and despised most of it, in the end I have to say that I’m proud of her. I’m not proud of all of the choices that she made, but I’m proud of her for taking huge risks, and for not giving a fuck what anyone thinks of her.

Listen to the Masocast interview co-hosted by myself and Unspeakable Axe.

*For those of you who are determined not to read it; or who have read it but can’t figure out what was redeeming about it; or who might want to read it and don’t mind spoilers, here are what I consider to be the important passages from Melissa Febos' book Whip Smart:

I had been looking, ironically, for a set of boundaries—someone who might give them to me. While I didn’t find that at the dungeon, I found a way to give myself permission to admit my own fantasies of powerlessness.

p.257-8

…my judgments loosened as well; I no longer had to cling so tightly to my superiority over the women I’d worked with, or the men. It felt good to renounce my expertise in judging others’ limits; it also made the world bigger, gave it back some of its mystery.

p.258

…I filled with a surprising tenderness, for myself, for all humans, so much more alike than we thought. I felt the urge to somehow make amends for my ignorance, my small-mindedness. It never ceases to amaze me that those who consider themselves liberal are capable of, myself a case in point. Scary, how easy it was to judge and belittle those around me, even while I shared their experience. In my meetings, people talked about those who were constitutionally incapable of looking at themselves with honesty. Honesty had turned out to be something I grew into. Some truths are too much for some constitutions, though I have seen my constitution change more than once.

p.258

Only when I stopped did I realize how much energy I put forth in seduction…A surrender to values I already had…Always trying to manage the responsibility of keeping everything in control…then trying to find a way out of it…looking for permission to stop.

p.271-2

I did miss it sometimes…but I didn’t miss the best part—that feeling of pressing up against the barest parts of being human. I thought I had to look for it in dark places.

p.27